


First Born

by InkSiren



Category: The Frankenstein Chronicles (TV)
Genre: Blood and Gore, Body Horror, Extremely Questionable Science, Gen, Graphic Description, Macabre, Non-Consensual Body Modification, Other, Resurrection, Surgery
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-06
Updated: 2020-12-06
Packaged: 2021-03-09 17:53:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27910309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/InkSiren/pseuds/InkSiren
Summary: John Marlott is special. Daniel does everything in his power to make him his first true success.AKA: I got obsessed with Daniel and felt a burning need to write John's revival from his POV.
Comments: 5
Kudos: 8





	First Born

**Author's Note:**

> If you're squeamish, don't do creepy warped headspaces, or in general don't feel like reading about exposed organs, probably don't read this today.
> 
> There's also some abstract rather warped body worship, please read at your own discretion.

It pains him to do it, but Daniel Hervey must leave the collection of his new material to his usual contacts. 

Marlott he had badly wanted to retrieve himself, but the chances of being caught are too high and if he’s caught the entire thing will be lost. Even a man like Marlott has a time limit on resurrection, and the longer they delay the less the pre-serum can help.

Assuming John actually used it. Daniel scrubs at his eyes and tries not to worry, looking again at the fire burning down and twisting a pen between his fingers. His notes are all laid out, the lab meticulously prepared. Every factor Daniel can possibly control he has, in triplicate. 

Everything is sterile, the fire is stoked, and he’s taken great care to ensure it will be peaceful. A woman in labor would envy the room, but a baby has a gentle start to life compared with what his creature will be faced with, and he so badly wants this one to live.

When the robbers finally arrive, Daniel feels a spear of anger at how Marlott’s body has been treated. He’s been tossed around like so much straw, and even though this is no different to the treatment of other bodies he’s been given, this one is special. He dismisses them with a snap and a look that could freeze, and he carries John the rest of the way himself.

The body is bigger and heavier than he is, but he will not let him be handled by anyone else. It's no matter, he’s learned how to support many ailing bodies of all kinds. 

This one he shoulders and carries like one soldier might another from a battlefield. 

When they are alone, Daniel feels a sudden nervousness, and he steps back, glancing again across his tools, his fire, his plans. He is humming with an energy that is too much for just his body, and as he carefully removes the hood and strokes back the hair from Marlott’s ashen brow, he thinks in a moment of fancy that maybe some of that life will help kindle this one. 

With the body now in front of him and the time no longer slipping away, Daniel moves gingerly, slowly, undressing Marlott with care and folding the clothing to be put aside. Once free, he drapes a blanket across Marlott’s hips and squeezes hot water from a sponge, wiping away grime and sweat and, he thinks, maybe even a tear. 

“He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death,” he murmurs, and smooths clean water across John’s cheekbone and into his hair. 

Once he’s clean, Daniel sets about assessing damage. It’s a strange process, the exhumation of muscle and bone revealing memories fossilized between. 

Here is a cut at the shoulder from a cavalry sabre from John’s time in the 95th Rifles. It is long healed, stitched with a fine hand, and it is little more than a white line now. Judging by the way Marlott moved in life, even the muscle beneath has healed beautifully. 

Here is a slight ridge to a rib, where it was likely cracked in battle and set improperly. 

Here is a bruise from three nights back, greening and useless, sadly unable to finish its intent to heal.

The damage to his neck can only be felt. His heart did not beat long enough to show any real inflammation, and when Daniel takes the head in his hands and feels carefully along the vertebrae he holds his breath.

As he reaches the base of the neck he lets it out, smiling a little. The drop must have suffocated him: the spinal vertebrae are intact. That is good. He can repair damage to the spinal cord itself with stitches and serums, but bone would have been complicated to reforge. 

All the same, he thinks, better to check. He will need to access the windpipe and spinal column anyway to properly repair and apply formulas, so he picks up a freshly sterilized scalpel and considers where he should cut. He settles on lower down. It will be more difficult to peel the skin back to access what he must, but in the end it will be kinder. When Marlott wakes, Daniel wants him to be able to hide the scars. At least until he grows accustomed to them. 

On the surface, as scalpel draws a still red line around Marlott’s collar, Daniel can see no evidence of the serum. He doesn’t allow that to worry him. He’d shown John the end he was speeding towards, that should have been enough.

Internally is where he’ll really see, anyway. And even if John hasn’t been dosing himself, the resurrection can still happen. It’ll just be more difficult.

Daniel is not afraid of a challenge, or really, of failure. But there is a feeling around John, a clinging to him that has been there since their first meeting and Daniel feels a kind of frantic energy that Marlott be his first. 

His first viable. His first lasting. His first born.

He peels back skin and probes muscle, tendon, cartilage, assessing the damage done by the noose. 

The hyoid bone is intact, and Hervey breathes a sigh of relief. Without that Marlott would find swallowing and speaking near impossible. Were it broken, Hervey’s best idea was to replace it, and it is not something he wants to do. 

He sees little wrong with the design of the human body--indeed it inspires him, awes him. It is the way that it decays that is the problem. 

The ligaments connecting hyoid bone to the muscles that it anchors are in tatters, but Hervey threads a needle and stitches them back together with the care of a seamstress on silk. He treats other torn ligaments the same then turns his attention to the ruptured larynx with a furrow between his brows. He wipes his hands, and considers, and then sets about repairing that too. 

Little by little he locates damage and embalms it with serums and stitches, injecting healing agents into both carotid arteries and the spinal cord last. Were Marlott’s heart beating, it would do this careful work for him, but that’s the ultimate trick of the entire thing: Daniel had to take the power of life from Marlott’s heart in order to rebuild it in his own image.

The power of a considerable number of other hearts factors in as well, but as Hervey pulls a clear solution into a bright needle, they are all now just paints for him to mix as he pleases. 

He does not please that this one should cease beating under the burden of syphilis and grief and years.

The heart is the key, the hearts have always been the key, and so after stitching closed the wounds of the throat, he turns his attention to Marlott’s chest. 

It takes significant strength to saw through his breastbone. 

“I am sorry,” he says, checking that the sawblade is keen. “But you will heal from this. And considerably more, if my theories are correct.” 

They are, he knows it.

Peeling back skin and bone and muscle feels like peeling back time, revealing a realm that anatomy had thought discreet. More healed fractures show as subtle lines, faint enough that Daniel knows Marlott must have suffered them in his youth while a soldier. The lung tissue is soft and he would consider, healthy...were it not dead.

He savors this. Autopsies are an entirely different practice, a mere look at the destruction of the human machine. It’s a powerless ritual, like sifting through the ashes of a temple to find that not only is the roof cinders and the walls crumbling but the idols are scorched and melted beyond recognition too. 

From the outside, a dead body stinks of destruction, but to peel back and see the origin of that destruction is even more wrenching.

Daniel feels a lump in his throat, and his fingers stray to touch the cold muscle of the heart. In this case, the heart is not the origin of Marlott’s death. It is a victim.

The unnatural bulging beginning in the aorta marks the next thing that would have killed him, should the noose have failed.

“Maybe you would have been spared the culmination of your madness after all,” Daniel says, brow furrowed with sympathy as he touches the strained tissue. He selects another scalpel with his free hand and opens the pericardium, moving slowly so he does not nick coronary arteries as he goes. He peels it back, a yellowish fluid trickling out as he exposes the heart itself. It is strained, the beginnings of unnatural development showing in its walls. 

“The disease was taking its terrible toll, my friend,” Daniel tells Marlott, slipping his fingers beneath the heart to lift it slightly towards the light. He turns it without torquing the arteries, then clucks his tongue. “I will remedy this before we wake you, have no fear.” 

He turns his attention on the arterial damage, and carefully cuts around the aorta, freeing the heart in part from the rest of the body. He almost leaves it there, but a deep desire passes over him and he severs the rest before he can decide not to. Blood pools apathetic in the cavity left behind. 

Setting the scalpel aside, Daniel lifts Marlott’s heart away from the body and into a brighter light, fascinated by its form. 

He’s held dozens of hearts. There is a design to them that is universal, and yet each is perfectly unique. Unique in their form, their strength, and in their damage. Marlott’s has been infected by his affliction, and yet Daniel can see the resolve that allowed it to go on beating as long as it had.

The damage is early, and Marlott was still defiantly strong when the noose cut him short. The weight of his heart, the healthy development of muscle trained by a soldier’s life and an active retirement attests to that. 

Daniel intends to make him stronger. To fix what God neglected. 

“I always thought it strange that he would allow his creatures to waste away like they do. No artist allows ravage so carelessly,” he says softly, setting the heart on a tray in a nest of gauze. He wipes his fingers and reaches again for the scalpel, cutting away at the damaged aorta. He pinches it back together to the size it had once been, and threads a new needle. 

“I decided young he must not really exist of course, but it bears thinking on,” he continues, stitching another and another and another until the syphilis is reduced to a few neat threads. He turns the heart again, feeling the valves with a careful finger. They are still elastic and intact, healthier than he’d expect from a man Marlott’s age and he smiles. It is evidence of his serum. So John had listened after all.

“Good. Very good. We will heal you yet.” 

He turns back to the body with a renewed energy, trading scalpel for new threads and syringes. He injects a fresh serum into the cardiac muscle, then bathes it in a purging cocktail, allowing it to rest in a bowl while he works on the body. Painstakingly he cuts away the disease, patches the damage, and then bathes the wounds in the fluid distilled from a dozen others. 

When he is done, he re-connects the heart with care, and he doesn’t speak again until the pericardium is ready to be closed. He is reaching for the last needle when he hesitates again. “You’ll forgive my curiosity but…”

And he shifts to the final serum instead. The chest needs to be open for this treatment, there’s no reason he cannot close the pericardium after revival too. 

He wants nothing in the way when John’s heart begins to beat again.

He’s been calm this entire time, but now that they’re down to the moment of truth Daniel feels his own heart racing to the point of making him nauseous. He’s humming again with that nervous energy, and he allows himself a moment of pause to take in a deep breath and close his eyes, focusing on the heart beating so quickly behind his own breastbone. He waits a moment, another, and feels cold glass under his fingers. 

He cradles Marlott’s heart in his left hand and injects the catalyst.

Setting the syringe aside, he takes the heart again in both of his own hands and drives his thumbs into it, massaging the serum through a system he now thinks of as simply dormant. It is ready to wake, so how can he call it dead any longer?

He forces Marlott’s heart through almost a hundred beats and his hands are aching by the time there is a twitch. He freezes, staring, and another tremor wracks the organ. 

Time holds its breath behind him, and for a moment everything, even his own heart, is perfectly still.

A violent contraction seizes the muscle in his palm and he startles. Another, this time a true beat, and another and then another and he finds himself laughing as a tear wets his jaw. “That’s it,” he encourages, slipping his hand away with care. “That’s it, yes, that’s it.”

He’s scrambling now, stitching the pericardium back up, closing the ribs and binding the sternum back over its ward. All through Marlott’s heart continues to beat and a fresh color is blossoming through his skin, his organs. His lungs try to wake and as he works Daniel sees the diaphragm twitch and then falter. Worry flashes through him and he pauses, another aborted breath pulling at the lungs. 

"No, come on," he says, moving with bloody hands to Marlott's head where he tilts it back and seals their lips, breathing into John's lungs. He waits, letting gravity empty them as much as it will before giving another breath. 

The third breath John has he takes for himself and Daniel doesn't notice the bloody fingerprints he's left on his jaw.

Stitch after stitch covers organs with bone and then bone again with flesh and after so long in the silence Daniel is acutely aware of Marlott’s breathing.

For a while he can even hear the heart beating entirely without bending near to it.

When he is finally finished he collapses into a chair, wiping his hands and watching Marlott anxiously. He continues to breathe, and to Daniel's delight he sees signs of brain activity as the eyes twitch beneath the lids. 

Somewhere around then Daniel's senses dull from their adrenaline fueled sharpness and he is disappointed to find the only heart he can hear is his own. He places his fingers instead against Marlott's jaw and watches as his collarbones rise and fall with another breath. 

Taking out a watch, he counts. 

"Fifty five, and strong." He murmurs, the softness of joy, of fondness in his dark eyes. He moves his fingers from throat to cheek and cradles John's head. "You're alive," he whispers, closing his eyes as another tear marks a trail on his skin. He bends forward and presses a kiss to Marlott's brow. 

The skin is warm. 

"My first born, you are alive."


End file.
